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Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

blog.spiderlabs.com

21–30 of 68 posts

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#21

Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the additional benefits of using a password manager such as 1Password is that it thwarts keyloggers. They may only get your master password (which shouldn't be your password on any site) but your site specific user name and password are never actually typed.

yeah but then all you have to do is get hit by a virus specifically designed for that one password manager and you lose everything

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#22

"This keylogger program can be legitimately purchased and used, ostensibly for monitoring your kids’ or employees’ browsing habits, etc. As you can imagine, PK can also be used for badness." Is this person suggesting that using a keylogger to spy on your employees/children without their knowledge is not 'badness'?!

There are legitimate uses for a keylogger. You can argue about children, but I can certainly imagine circumstances where I'd think about using one on my kids.

As for employees, if it's a work computer I pretty much say anything is fair game.

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#23

Reverse engineering stuff like this can be fun. I remember trying to reverse engineer some random .exe that got emailed to me once. I disassembled it but all I found was some basic initialization code and then a jmp to an address that didn't seem to exist. However when I ran it (in a VM) with a debugger it seemed to go through all kinds of Win32 Calls. Very odd

It's very common for malware (or other code that doesn't want to be reverse engineered) to be decrypting itself in the that initialization loop to generate the code that is jumped to. It is also very common for malware to use exception handling as control flow, which could also explain a nonsense jump.

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping that "emailed the ISP" means "deleted the contents of the server and emailed the ISP".

Or, change the FTP password and email that to the ISP abuse team. Spammer is locked out.

How are you going to change an FTP password from an FTP client?

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#25
post #14

Ah good old HIEW. It's the simplest and nicest disassembler - open a file switch to disassembly with one keypress. Move one line or one byte at a time for defeating code that jumps in the middle of instructions, edit the assembly (ok code bytes) in place with live preview what instructions you're writing. All in 130KB of code :) http://www.hiew.ru/ EDIT: I wonder why is the author using a version from 2004 though...…

> This tool is well worth the money!!!

To you, maybe. I have no use for it, so it's not, especially when it costs $200.

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, change the FTP password and email that to the ISP abuse team. Spammer is locked out.

How are you going to change an FTP password from an FTP client?

Good point. Meh. Assume it's also root pass for SSH on that box?

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#27
post #3

I wonder how he just happened to notice the keylogger connecting to FTP? Did he have a monitor in the background or something? Seems like that would be a good practice for doing things like this, and this guy obviously knows his stuff.

Yes, on a machine where you do analysis like that, you typically monitor all outgoing and incoming connections.

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#28
> Well, for the dump file BPK.DAT, the XOR key partially worked, but to make it more readable I XORed it using two bytes 0xAA, 0x00

I'd say the older version that was analyzed before wasn't using unicode yet, whereas the later version was.

Very cool how you see the effects of character encodings all over the place - even where you don't expect them.

Also, if done right, the "encryption" should IMHO have been done after the file has been written in its native encoding using an input byte sequence. But seeing that the XOR key had that second 0 byte, I'd say that the encryption was done using a "string" key instead of plain bytes.

And don't get me started on the idea of using XOR as "encryption" - especially with repeated pattern like this, this can't even be reasonably called obfuscation IMHO.

Re: Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger

#30
post #28

> Well, for the dump file BPK.DAT, the XOR key partially worked, but to make it more readable I XORed it using two bytes 0xAA, 0x00 I'd say the older version that was analyzed before wasn't using unicode yet, whereas the later version was. Very cool how you see the effects of character encodings all over the place - even where you don't expect them. Also, if done right, the "encryption" should IMHO have been done aft…

Peeve: Not unicode, UTF16. Unicode apps aren't synonymous with wide characters (though on Windows you're pretty much stuck as that's what the API picked, sigh), and in fact UTF8 is an objectively better encoding for almost all users.
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